The tug-of-war over the future of containers is growing even more intense with the introduction of new collaboration capabilities from CoreOS Inc. aimed at helping developers make more out of its homegrown variation on the emerging virtualization format. The launch will help level the playing field against the bigger and better-established competition.

That means Docker Inc., which has opened a considerable lead in both adoption and funding thanks to its initial role in elevating containerization to industry prominence. It’s also managed to build a hosted registry to monetize the technology along the way. The new additions to Quay, the rival service that CoreOS gained through its acquisition of the startup of the same name last year, makes up for some of that gap.

The biggest enhancement is the ability to revert changes as far back as two weeks, a feature Docker Hub has offered almost from the outset that is invaluable in the kind of fast-paced environments where containers are currently finding the most use. After all, updating an application multiple times a day significantly increases the chance of a bug slipping through and thus also the need for a quick rollback.

The ability to efficiently revert changes is secondary only to giving developers the ability to move so quickly in the first place, which the upgrade addresses with the addition of a cache that avoids the need to completely re-build a source file after making changes. Organizations can further streamline the application lifecycle through newly added integration with two popular code management tools, Git Lab and BitBuck, which highlights CoreOS’s efforts to attract third party support.

That push focuses not only – or mainly, for that matter – on Quay but rather its containerization standard, which gained the backing of no fewer than three more major players in conjunction with the update to the service. The list includes Red Hat Inc., the Linux distributor that takes the credit for catapulting Docker out of obscurity with early endorsement of the technology, and Google, a potentially even more significant ally.

The search giant is the creator and prime backer of Kubernetes, the most popular option for orchestrating container clusters in the ecosystem, which has been integrated with CoreOS’s technology as part of the partnership. That will lower the entry barrier to creating the kind of composite cloud applications that the likes of Spotify Inc. and Gilt Inc. are already using Docker for.

Rounding out the list of new backers is Apcera Inc., which provides a cloud platform for running such services. The next few months will likely see CoreOS add more deployment options, with OpenStack and Mesosphere representing the most obvious integration candidates.